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Nature is not a temple but a workshop, and man is the workman in it. Men judge things according to their own feelings; they forget that in time all things change their aspect.

— Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
1d ago

The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the taffrail of our craft like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.

3w ago
themarginalian.org
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are

It felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth's atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren't in space. We were on earth — finally, really on earth.

3w ago

We are apt to think that our ideas are the measure of things, and that silence means ignorance. But nature has other standards than ours, and there is a vast deal going on in the world which we cannot translate into human speech.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Live

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

1mo ago

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

1mo ago

The sea's unceasing motion is not restlessness but fidelity — it returns always to the same shores, wearing them away not by violence but by the patient insistence of its nature.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Competitive Fly Fishing Edition

The fish choosing to move to the water-air interface, and pierce it with its mouth, to put its water-dwelling self into our world, is something magical.

1mo ago

The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the taffrail of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Not to Waste Your Wildness

The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.

1mo ago

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. He who has learned to love a flower has learned something of the secret of being at home in the world.

2mo ago

We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

2mo ago

It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.

2mo ago

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith.

2mo ago

The truth is that every living thing needs primarily to live. The seed struggles toward life with the same urgency as the man. And to live is to create, which is to say, to organize matter according to a dream.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Bear Your Desolations

A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard, the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can't bear, dissolves and, like a needle slipped into your vein — that sudden rush of the world.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

2mo ago

The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Oppenheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love. Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation.

2mo ago
theconvivialsociety
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

2mo ago

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

2mo ago
theconvivialsociety
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

3mo ago

The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a manthe other day picking up an arrowhead on the Assabet, and it suggested the same thoughts as if I had found it myself—that there is something very congenial between the sight of such an object and the human mind.

3mo ago

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

3mo ago

We have not the reverence for what is green and growing that we ought to have. A man's relation to Nature must be humble, as his relation to God. He must not think himself greater than the grass.

4mo ago

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.

4mo ago

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches.

4mo ago

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend it. And to defend it, you must love it.

4mo ago

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

4mo ago

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

5mo ago

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. And within that home there are no sermons preached, no creeds recited; only the ancient, wordless liturgy of wind and stone.

5mo ago

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

5mo ago
themarginalian.org
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

6mo ago

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

7mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Stop Doing and Start Living

Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.

7mo ago

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